Armed with Science | Tag Archive

Saturday Space Sight: Pinwheel Galaxy Rainbow

Filed under Photos, Space by jtozer on November 24, 2012 at 7:40 am {no comments}

This image of the Pinwheel Galaxy, or M101, combines data in the infrared, visible, ultraviolet and X-rays from four of NASA‘s space telescopes.

The view shows that both young and old stars are evenly distributed along M101′s tightly wound spiral arms. Such composite images allow astronomers to see how features in one part of the light spectrum match up with those seen in other parts. It’s like seeing with a regular camera, an ultraviolet camera, night-vision goggles and X-ray vision, all at once!

The Pinwheel galaxy is in the constellation of Ursa Major (also known as the Big Dipper). It is about 70 percent larger than our own Milky Way galaxy, with a diameter of about 170,000 light-years, and sits at a distance of 21 million light-years from Earth. This means that the light we’re seeing in this image left the Pinwheel galaxy about 21 million years ago — many millions of years before humans ever walked the Earth.

The red colors in the image show infrared light, as seen by the Spitzer Space Telescope. These areas show the heat emitted by dusty lanes in the galaxy, where stars are forming.

The yellow component is visible light, observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. Most of this light comes from stars, and they trace the same spiral structure as the dust lanes seen in the infrared.

The blue areas show ultraviolet light, given out by hot, young stars that formed about 1 million years ago. The Galaxy Evolution Explorer, which NASA recently loaned to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., captured this component of the image.

Finally, the hottest areas are shown in purple, where the Chandra X-ray observatory observed the X-ray emission from exploded stars, million-degree gas and material colliding around black holes.

JPL manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. Data are archived at the Infrared Science Archive housed at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

For more information about Spitzer, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer and http://spitzer.caltech.edu.
From www.jpl.nasa.gov

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Saturday Space Sight: NASA’s Spitzer Sees Light of Lonesome Stars

Filed under Photos, Space by jtozer on November 17, 2012 at 7:12 am {no comments}

A new study using data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope suggests a cause for the mysterious glow of infrared light seen across the entire sky. It comes from isolated stars beyond the edges of galaxies. These stars are thought to have once belonged to the galaxies before violent galaxy mergers stripped them away into the relatively empty space outside of their former homes.

“The infrared background glow in our sky has been a huge mystery,” said Asantha Cooray of the University of California at Irvine, lead author of the new research published in the journal Nature. “We have new evidence this light is from the stars that linger between galaxies. Individually, the stars are too faint to be seen, but we think we are seeing their collective glow.”

The findings disagree with another theory explaining the same background infrared light observed by Spitzer. A group led by Alexander “Sasha” Kashlinsky of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., proposed in June this light, which appears in Spitzer images as a blotchy pattern, is coming from the very first stars and galaxies.

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Saturday Space Sight: NASA’s NuSTAR Spots Flare From Milky Way’s Black Hole

Filed under Photos by jtozer on November 10, 2012 at 7:02 am {no comments}

NASA‘s newest set of X-ray eyes in the sky, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), has caught its first look at the giant black hole parked at the center of our galaxy. The observations show the typically mild-mannered black hole during the middle of a flare-up.

“We got lucky to have captured an outburst from the black hole during our observing campaign,” said Fiona Harrison, the mission’s principal investigator at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. “These data will help us better understand the gentle giant at the heart of our galaxy and why it sometimes flares up for a few hours and then returns to slumber.”

The new images can be seen by visiting this page.

NuSTAR, launched June 13, is the only telescope capable of producing focused images of the highest-energy X-rays. For two days in July, the telescope teamed up with other observatories to observe Sagittarius A* (pronounced Sagittarius A-star and abbreviated Sgr A*), the name astronomers give to a compact radio source at the center of the Milky Way. Observations show a massive black hole lies at this location.

Participating telescopes included NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, which sees lower-energy X-ray light; and the W.M. Keck Observatory atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii, which took infrared images.

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The Army’s Real UFO

Filed under Space by jtozer on November 8, 2012 at 7:03 am {no comments}

Volunteers Ed Keinle and Lou Thole remove rivets from the Avro Canada VZ-9AV Avrocar in the restoration hangar at the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. Although the Avrocar was never implemented, museum officials feel it serves as a successful teaching tool. (U.S. Air Force photo)

The grainy film showed a round ship floating out of a hangar.

Its silver, aluminum exterior glinted in the sun as it hovered a few feet off the ground. As it glided over a pool of water, it kicked debris into the air and the glass canopies of the two cockpits were showered with grass and gravel as the saucer flew forward.

It may seem like a scene out of a classic Hollywood blockbuster, but the footage is documentation of testing held by the U.S. government on an experimental aircraft.

This prototype, and fascinating piece of American history, sits on display at the National U.S. Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, and another resides at U.S. Army Transportation Museum at Fort Eustis, Va., where plans are underway for its restoration.

With its round design standing at nearly five feet tall and 18 feet wide, the Avro Canada VZ-9AV Avrocar looks like something out of a 1950s science-fiction film.

While it may look like something a martian would fly, the Avrocar is anything but science fiction.

Newly declassified documents concerning the Avrocar project were released Oct. 8, when they were published by the U.S. National Archives. Information about the aircraft has been available for years, but the documents now include diagrams that clearly demonstrate the scope of the project.

“The Avrocar was a good start, and the first step on a long road to discovering technology we use today,” said Jeff Underwood, National Museum of the U.S. Air Force historian. “Although the project was never implemented, it serves a successful teaching tool.”

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Saturday Space Sight: Helloooo, Saturn

Filed under Photos, Space by jtozer on November 3, 2012 at 7:00 am {no comments}

The Cassini spacecraft takes an angled view toward Saturn, showing the southern reaches of the planet with the rings on a dramatic diagonal.

North on Saturn is up and rotated 16 degrees to the left. This view looks toward the southern, unilluminated side of the rings from about 14 degrees below the ringplane. The rings cast wide shadows on the planet’s southern hemisphere.

The moon Enceladus (313 miles, or 504 kilometers across) appears as a small, bright speck in the lower left of the image.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.8 million miles (2.9 million kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 72 degrees. Image scale is 11 miles (17 kilometers) per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL.

The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

Photo by NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
From www.nasa.gov
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Saturday Space Sight: Helix Nebula – Unraveling At The Seams

Filed under Photos, Space, STEM by jtozer on October 27, 2012 at 7:04 am {no comments}

A dying star is throwing a cosmic tantrum in this combined image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX), which NASA has lent to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. In death, the star’s dusty outer layers are unraveling into space, glowing from the intense ultraviolet radiation being pumped out by the hot stellar core.

This object, called the Helix nebula, lies 650 light-years away, in the constellation of Aquarius. Also known by the catalog number NGC 7293, it is a typical example of a class of objects called planetary nebulae. Discovered in the 18th century, these cosmic works of art were erroneously named for their resemblance to gas-giant planets.

Planetary nebulae are actually the remains of stars that once looked a lot like our sun. These stars spend most of their lives turning hydrogen into helium in massive runaway nuclear fusion reactions in their cores. In fact, this process of fusion provides all the light and heat that we get from our sun. Our sun will blossom into a planetary nebula when it dies in about five billion years.

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Saturday Space Sight: Next Station Crew Preps for Launch

Filed under Photos by jtozer on October 20, 2012 at 7:41 am {one comment}

NASA astronaut Kevin Ford (left), Expedition 33 flight engineer and Expedition 34 commander; Soyuz Commander Oleg Novitskiy (center) and Flight Engineer Evgeny Tarelkin (right) clasp hands in front of a Soyuz vehicle mock-up as they wrap up two days of final qualification exams at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia.

The trio is scheduled to launch Tuesday, Oct. 23 in their Soyuz TMA-06M spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for a five-month mission on the International Space Station.

Photo credit: NASA

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Saturday Space Sight – Auroras Over North America

Filed under Photos, Space, STEM by jtozer on October 13, 2012 at 7:28 am {no comments}

On October 4-5, 2012, a mass of energetic particles from the atmosphere of the Sun were flung out into space, a phenomenon known as a coronal mass ejection. Three days later, the storm from the Sun stirred up the magnetic field around Earth and produced gorgeous displays of northern lights

NASA satellites track such storms from their origin to their crossing of interplanetary space to their arrival in the atmosphere of Earth.

Using the “day-night band” (DNB) of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) satellite acquired this view of the aurora borealis early on the morning of October 8, 2012. The northern lights stretch across Canada’s Quebec and Ontario provinces in the image, and are part of the auroral oval that expanded to middle latitudes because of a geomagnetic storm.

The DNB sensor detects dim light signals such as auroras, airglow, gas flares, city lights, and reflected moonlight. In the case of the image above, the sensor detected the visible light emissions as energetic particles rained down from Earth’s magnetosphere and into the gases of the upper atmosphere. The images are similar to those collected by the Operational Linescan System flown on U.S. Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) satellites for the past three decades.

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